Sunday, May 28, 2017

Lee Ming-che Charged

Beijing late on Friday announced that Taiwanese human rights advocate Lee Ming-che (李明哲) is being held for suspected subversion of state power.
.....
Lee has been detained in Hunan Province since March 19, An said, adding that he and “his partners in crime have directly confessed that they carried out activities that threaten our national security.”

An said that an investigation found that Lee had since 2012 frequently traveled to China, and worked with Chinese to develop plans and establish an illegal ring to subvert Beijing.

The government demanded that Beijing adhere to the Cross-Strait agreement on crime fighting and prosecution. Good luck with that... Beijing is ignoring that.

Some previous reports had contended that Lee's arrest was an isolated case of the local authorities acting without Beijing's advance approval, even that it was a mistake and someone else was supposed to be arrested. This report says that Beijing has ratified that by inventing a case -- probably some harmless meetings between Lee and activists in China -- or else they knew all along and it was not a case of local police grabbing him on their own, but was done at the behest of Beijing.

I think lots of us are wondering whether we will see the taped confession routine with Lee.

We will once again see the inevitable comments about how this will shape Taiwanese views of China. It will have little effect. Taiwanese have already amply confirmed they do not want to be part of China, and they have already amply confirmed they detest China's government. This will just be another nugget on the pile.

MEDIA: Reuters in its article on the arrest continues to mindlessly parrot Xinhua:

Relations between China and Taiwan have cooled since Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen took power last year, because she refuses to concede that the self-ruled island is part of China.

China's nothingburger on NKorea drew a warning from the US State Department. Yeah, it was hard to predict that China would do nothing. I assume the resumption of FONOPs is the US admitting that stopping them had no effect on China.

_______________________[Taiwan] Don't miss the comments below! And check out my blog and its sidebars for events, links to previous posts and picture posts, and scores of links to other Taiwan blogs and forums!

COMMENTS: May take a while. Google screwed up the old Comments functions in its most recent "upgrade" which really hurt the functionality and usability of Blogger, another trademark Google upgrade that made problems worse while adding more clicks to get anything done.

Photos on this blog are hosted by Flickr. I used to enthusiastically recommend Flickr but the new site changes have grievously impaired its usefulness. My current recommendation: find another photo host. My photos at Flickr. Just click on any photo to be taken to its Flickr page to view it in larger size.